Wolf Worm — Chapter 13

CHAPTER 13

This time, I took no chances. No more following people through the dark and diving for cover. I armed myself with a candle and matches, though I didn’t dare light them in the woods. It seemed unlikely that anyone would see it, with the doctor gone and Phelps thankfully not staying at the house overnight. Nevertheless, I did not want to get into the shed and find myself stumbling around blind.

Could it really be unlocked? Really? Was I finally about to learn what Halder was experimenting on?

Don’t get your hopes up. You might just have missed the click, that’s all.

But if you didn’t, then you’ll know soon.

Dusk spread ultramarine shadows under the trees, then deepened into dark. I paced the studio restlessly, unable to settle. Soon. Soon.

I thought I had successfully buried my curiosity, but apparently I had only shoved it down to fester into obsession. When I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I looked almost feverish. Two spots of color burned high on my cheeks, a rose madder wash on cold white skin.

Soon.

I waited until I heard Mrs. Kent leave, waited a little longer, then slipped out the door and into the woods.

The walk to the shed took far too long, and I forgot it all instantly the moment that I arrived. It was a dark night and the shadows were thick around the shed. At least, I thought it was dark? My vision seemed odd somehow, the edges bright with pinpricks of light, but it didn’t make it any easier to see.

Calm down. Your heart is pounding like you’ve been running.

I shook myself. Regardless of the darkness, it was easy to make out the heavy lock. I put out a hand, my heart in my throat, and tugged down.

It opened without a sound.

My god, my god, it’s open, it’s really open!

With nerveless fingers, I slid the lock from the hasp and hung it back on the door. I stepped over the threshold, swung the door shut behind me, and stood in darkness. When I reached out, the fabric of the drape caught my

fingers.

Steady … steady … I took the matches from my pocket. You’re going to feel awfully silly if you light that thing and the room really is full of gunpowder. Unless you drop the match and then you won’t feel anything for long.

Ah yes, that rare gunpowder that eats live chickens, I snapped back at myself, and lit the match, then the candle.

The space between the drape and the wall was only wide enough for the door to open. Behind the door was a peg with something hanging from it, something so oddly incongruous that I paused with my hand on the drape. It looked like a lady’s hat with a veil. Huh. That’s strange.

Unlike everything else about this situation, which is totally normal.

I pushed the drape aside. The stairs yawned below me. Something flickered in their depths, and for an instant I thought there was someone else down there, until I realized I was looking at a reflection. The early summer rains had left at least three inches of water on the floor of the hollowed-out room.

There, I told myself triumphantly. No one stores gunpowder in ankle- deep water. Fortunately, I was wearing my sturdy boots. I hitched my skirt up to keep the hem dry and descended the staircase.

The first thing that came into view was a wooden table. It held a chipped enamel pan and what looked like a pair of rusted forceps, but nothing else of interest.

My last step onto the floor splashed instead of squelched. Someone had laid boards down over the clay. It felt surprisingly solid underfoot. Burlap had been tacked up over the walls and boards covered the ceiling as well, braced and re-braced.

I had only a moment to take that in, however. My attention was immediately claimed by the second table in the back of the room.

The one with the corpse laid out atop it.

It was very obviously a corpse. No living human, even in the farthest extremes of starvation, could look like that. The ribs were etched so deeply that I could have fit my hand into the grooves between them. Skin and hair still clung to the body, otherwise I would have called it a skeleton.

Strangely, I was not frightened. I had seen skeletons before. Art students use them to study anatomy. I took a step forward, the water splashing around my feet, and lifted my candle higher.

It—he—looked desiccated, despite the thick humidity of the air. I thought of mummies pulled from Egyptian tombs. His skin had shrunk so tight against the bone that I could see the sunken depression between the bones of his forearms, leading down to the delicate bones of … the wrists,

bound with iron manacles … I swallowed hard.

My first attention had been for the corpse itself, not its surroundings. But now I looked and fear coiled up from my belly and took me by the throat.

The body lay spread-eagled on a wire mesh, heavy and widely spaced, like a fence panel, framed with wood. Iron shackles, dripping with rust, enclosed his wrists and ankles.

Oh god, I thought. Halder, what have you done?

If I had found that he was using human corpses in experiments with insects that ate carrion, I would have been horrified, yes. But the dead were dead and long past harming, and, God help me, I would have understood why he did it.

But the dead don’t need to be chained down.

I wanted to turn away. No, I wanted to run screaming. My vision swam.

Stop that. You are a naturalist, are you not?

This isn’t natural! I shouted inside my skull.

No. But you are a trained observer. So observe, damn you, and quit cringing.

My breathing steadied. I straightened my shoulders. The dead are dead.

Now the living have to take notes.

The corpse had been male, in life, though what remained was shrunken almost to nonexistence, and his face was stained with black around the nose and mouth. His hands had shrunken so far that he could have pulled loose from any ordinary shackle. In life, the fetters must have been cruelly tight.

But his fingers … what was wrong with his fingers?

They looked impossibly long and deformed, curling back on themselves.

So did his toes. I took another step forward, saw the sharp edges, and realized that I was looking at fingernails that had grown and grown and grown and never been trimmed.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. How long was this poor soul here?

The wire platform was about waist high, but there was a solid wooden shelf a few feet under it. A wide metal trough covered half of it, perhaps to catch the prisoner’s waste. I saw flashes of white in the candlelight and

leaned down.

Chicken feathers.

I had no time to dwell on what that might mean, because in bending down, I saw what lay on the underside of the wire mesh.

My first wild thought was that someone had poured wax over the body and that it had dripped downward, forming swollen droplets that hung from the underside of the corpse in pale swags. Then I saw the dark ovals on each swelling, the blunt black ends of larvae burrowed beneath the surface, and I knew.

I did not scream. I did not even flinch. I simply stared.

The botfly larvae had grown atop one another in places, dozens of fat warbles hanging together like bunches of sickly grapes. Under the corpse’s hips and lower back, they were so thickly clustered that they formed a mass as large as a man’s head. All the flesh that was missing from the bones hung below the mesh, filled with squirming, parasitic life.

I might have stood there, frozen, until dawn, if not for the candle. Hot wax burned a trail down my hand and I yelped and dropped it.

The flame hit the water and went out.

Panic leapt up and grabbed me by the throat. The blackness that engulfed me was a hundred times deeper and darker than anything aboveground. I went to my knees in the water, groping across the surface for the candle, because if I couldn’t find it, I was going to be blundering through the dark, looking for the exit, and what if I didn’t find it, what if I got turned around

and went toward the body instead, what if I reached out and my hand closed over the warbles, the soft flesh stretched tight around the dark body within, what if it moved … Stop that! I screamed at myself. Stop that!

My petticoats were soaked with water. It sloshed over the top of my boots. It was freezing cold, much colder than it had any right to be, but I kept sliding my hands across the surface, feeling desperately for the candle, terrified that I was making ripples that would send it floating even farther away.

And then my fingers touched something smooth and cylindrical and I felt it bobbing away and snatched it up. Found the wick. Nearly cried with relief.

I was groping in my pocket for matches when something buzzed against my face.

I batted it away with a shriek. It was big, the size of a bumblebee, and on some level I knew exactly what it was, but if I let that thought come up to the surface, I was going to pass out right here in the black water and then it would come and lay eggs in my skin and … The match flared up. My hands shook so violently that I had to move two steps and brace myself against the wooden table before I could light the candle. Cold fabric clung to my legs and I realized that I was weeping.

I lifted the candle just as the corpse opened its eyes.

When the hurricane’s eye had passed over the school, the howling winds dropped away and we sat in sudden, impossible silence. I felt the same way now. Inside my head, I heard myself think, with weary resignation, Of course. Botfly larvae require living flesh.

It was impossible that he was alive, and yet he turned his head to look at me. The sound of dry skin sliding across vertebrae was like a snake moving over stone. With the eerie calm of the hurricane’s eye, I saw that the black stains on his face were actually insects clustered around his nose and mouth.

Black and yellow flies. I knew them, of course. I knew their shape intimately. I had labored over paintings, using the finest brush I had to draw in every tiny, bristling hair.

Cracked lips parted. A fly clung to the corner of his mouth. His gums had receded so far that his teeth looked as long and sharp as a dog’s.

“… who … are … you…”

I should have been moved to pity. I should have thrown myself on the shackles and tried to break him free. But the storm’s eye was moving still and the wind inside my head was picking up.

Oh god. All this time I thought the big mystery was what happened to Louisa, and really it was what was happening down here.

Underneath the mesh, the warbles began to sway.

“… who…”

Drops of swollen white flesh began to ripple. I watched with horrible fascination as dark, blunt bodies began to struggle loose, the wolf worms birthing themselves into the world.

I staggered backward and hit the wooden table with a thud. Rough

boards dug into my back.

It broke the spell and I bolted.

The candle went out when I was halfway up the stairs, the flame extinguished as I splashed wax wildly. I dropped it, clutching for the drape.

Behind me, I heard a cry. Weaker than the one that I had heard a few weeks ago, but unmistakably the same—a shrill, rasping wail like sandpaper across my eardrums.

I flung the door back and made it out of the shed before I went to my knees, retching. Acid burned my throat, roared through the back of my nasal passages. It was agonizing but all I could think was, Please let it kill anything in there, please let them not have laid eggs in me, please God, please!

Even when I had stopped being sick, I couldn’t seem to get up. I wanted to run, I had to run, but I was shaking so hard that my teeth were chattering, and even in the midst of horror, some small part of me was annoyed by this.

I am handling this all quite badly. I expected better of me, really.

I wanted, more than anything, to crawl into my bed and pull the blankets over my head. Then maybe the last few minutes would stop and I could

push them into the past, into a thing that had happened, not a thing that was happening, right now, still.

Close the door. If I close the door, it’ll be over.

I wrestled with the drape, gasping through my raw throat, and swung the door shut. I understood now. It wasn’t to keep insects out for an experiment, it was to keep them in.

The lock clicked. I turned and staggered away, my stockings squelching

inside my shoes.

Something touched the back of my head.

It wasn’t heavy. No harder than a tap of Smiley’s paw, really. It might have been a pine cone falling. I reached up a hand to the back of my head, unthinking, and felt … legs.

Legs and bristles and a brief, papery buzz of wings and oh god it was huge it was on me right now— I slapped it away with a scream. Buzzing filled my ears but I was running like a rabbit. Wet fabric slapped against my legs with every step but I didn’t care. If I lost my footing, if I stepped in a hole, I could hurt myself terribly, but at that moment, I think I would have crawled on a broken leg rather than spend an instant longer in the woods.

I hit the back door, flung it open, and slammed it closed behind me. The clock in the hall chimed a quarter to ten as I passed. I had been gone barely twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes was long enough for something to have laid eggs.

What was it that Holder had said? Nasty fellows, botflies … The larva hatches out, waits for a host to walk by, latches on, and climbs inside.

Mouth, nose, anus, open wound, they don’t discriminate … Proper little monsters, they are.

Were there wolf worms climbing across my skin right now, looking for an opening? Had the one that landed on the back of my head been laying eggs? Were they on my hands, already hatching out in response to the warmth of my skin?

Had I touched my face or wiped my nose since I’d slapped away the

botfly?

I couldn’t remember.

My first thought was to scrub myself raw, remove anything the flies might have left behind, even if I had to use lye to do it. I was halfway to my

room before I thought of the cistern and the insect parts that swam in my basin. Oh god, no, I can’t—I couldn’t— The cold, scientific voice in the back of my head stepped in at last. I think perhaps I had disgusted myself completely. Think. You need clean water. How do you make sure water is clean?

Boil it, I answered. I wobbled on the stairs, nearly falling, turned back, and went to the kitchen. I put a pan of water on the stove to boil, then collapsed into a chair. It was warm and stoking the stove made it hotter, but I was still so horribly cold.

The water boiled. It seemed fast. Had I really been sitting at the table, staring at nothing, for the entire time? It didn’t seem long at all. I pulled the pan from the heat, looking at the rolling water. I had a wild urge to try and breathe it in and burn the larvae out with it, but the cold voice had taken over. Don’t be ridiculous. You must wait for it to cool. While you’re waiting, take off those wet boots and skirt.

I obeyed. My socks hung limp and sodden as I pulled them off and dropped them back into the boots. I started to shiver again. The room seemed dark or maybe it was just my vision going dark at the edges.

When the water had cooled enough that it was only somewhat painful instead of scalding, I went to the scullery and scrubbed my face, rinsed out my mouth, wiping at my nose. God only knew if it would work. Maybe they were like the deer botfly and one had already flicked larvae into my mouth when I screamed, and they would gather in clusters inside my mouth, squirming like a dozen extra tongues … I gargled until I nearly drowned. Then I poured more water over the back of my skull, scrubbing violently with the harsh kitchen soap. Strands tore, but I didn’t care. I had to stop it now, before I ended up like him, before Halder locked me away on a wire table and the flies clustered around my flesh and my fingernails grew as long as knives …

Mrs. Kent found me in the morning, slumped over the kitchen table. My hair was matted with soap and a pan half full of tepid water stood at my elbow.

“Miss Wilson?” she said, and then, carefully, “Sonia?”

I looked up at her blearily. I had to tell her something. I had to tell her that there was a monster in the shed and that Halder was the monster who kept it. I had to warn her. She could tell Jackson and he could bring the sheriff and they would go down where I had gone and see … “Sonia, hon, what’s wrong?” She took a few steps toward me.

My tongue felt thick. “Halder,” I mumbled. “He’s got a monster. The flies … the botflies…”

She pressed her wrist to my forehead and swore. “Sonia, you’re burning up.”

I shook my head. “Can’t be. Too cold. You’re cold.”

“Hon, you’re running a great big fever.” She shoved her arm under my shoulders and half lifted me out of the chair. “And you sitting here barefoot? In your underclothes?”

“No. Mrs. Kent. Rose. The flies. There’s so many flies! You have to listen!” I grabbed her arm, trying to make her understand, and then my vision swam sideways and Jackson was suddenly there. He swore and his wife didn’t scold him for it, which was surprising.

“Sonia,” said Mrs. Kent, in a no-nonsense voice, “you’re delirious.”

I blinked at her. “I am?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” Unutterable relief swept through me. I was delirious. That meant it wasn’t real. “Oh thank god,” I said, and fainted.

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